This week we are working on notan studies. My inspirations were Halloween, Vermeer, and Michael Kenna.

My first encounter with these simple, two-value studies was in Mitch Albala’s plein air landscape class where he taught us to make three or four thumbnails with a sharpie in order to quickly explore compositional alternatives before starting on a painting. I find notans to be powerful images in their own right, but they are worth doing because they teach us so much. Notan studies are great for

• Learning to simplify
• Seeing primal shapes and masses
• Experimenting with composition and balance
• Designing effective support for lost edges
• Understanding passage (one edge passing behind another)
• Demonstrating how little information is actually necessary to convey the essence of a three-dimensional scene.
• Using light and dark to model three-dimensional shapes
• Learning to read subtle visual cues